Category Archives: Education

I have been asked for audio copies of the sermons I do at church. It’s important to bear in mind that I’m not a pastor, I’m just a church leader that preaches when the need arises. I’m not a professional, but I do my best. If you aren’t interested in hearing me preach a Sunday morning message — I’m not offended in the least. 🙂

Really. They’re not for sale. This particular one was made by a 6th grader. She was one of the winners of the “design a bookmark” contest here at the school library. She’s also my daughter, which is awesome for many reasons. (No, Donna and I were not judges in the contest.)

The winning bookmarks, of which there are 12 or so, are being printed and laminated to give out in the library. I think it’s an awesome way for kids to see their artwork appreciated by others. Unfortunately, it does cost quite a bit to print & laminate them. It got me to thinking… I wonder if people would buy them if the library made them available for sale on Teh Internets. We’d have to get school board approval, etc, etc, but if they each sold for $1 or $2 including shipping, they’d recoup that toner/plastic cost in no time.

What do you think, Internets, would you buy a hand crafted bookmark designed by a book-loving elementary child? What if the proceeds benefited the library itself? Should I push my darling wife to get board approval for such an endeavor?

As many of you know, my wonderful wife works in the high school library. Even if you didn’t know that, it’s still true. Seriously though, one of the areas the library is severely lacking in is the science fiction department. Really, it’s slim pickings. So here is my request: Please leave in the comments what books you think should be in a high school library’s science fiction section. If all the recommendations come from me, it will basically just be full of my favorites. While that would suit me just fine, the thought of growing similar minded geeks is a bit unsettling. Please keep in mind:

Our community is pretty conservative, so graphic alien on alien action is likely a deal breaker.

Please don’t recommend a book that is in the middle of a series. Recommend the whole series. Seriously, my OCD can’t handle that nonsense. 🙂

Newer authors are encouraged. The classics are certainly not to be left out, but really — we want to introduce kids to new authors as well.

I think that’s it!

So please, leave your thoughts in the comments. Also, if you know anyone that would have an opinion on the issue, please pass a link along. I’m really hoping to get a good list together for her. Thank you!

It often sucks, quite frankly. Vacation is over, and tomorrow, all the staff and students will be bounding in the doors ready to tackle this new year with vim and vigor. (As opposed to emacs and vigor? Nevermind, nerd joke.) The problem with that is Saturday night, when I went home for the evening around 11PM — I hadn’t quite finished server work at the school. In fact, most of our mission critical servers were running in VMPlayer on my little workstation computer!

By the end of break, I had hoped we’d be moved over to a SAN based storage system, and that LTSP5 would be working on our really old hardware. That, sadly, didn’t happen. Even worse is that when I went home on Saturday my head was aching, and it turned into a knock down, drag out migraine that is still pounding quite severely. But the show must go on.

So here I am, at work with a pounding headache. It’s 11:30PM on Sunday night, but it needs to be done. Also for the record, 2010 sucks so far. 🙂